TRR 294:  Strukturwandel des Eigentums

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences ; Humanities
• Term: since 2021
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424638267

The planned collaborative research centre is based on a diagnosis of conflicts unfolding in the present: while private property grew increasingly important, concentrated and deregulated after 1989, the resulting system of ownership appears to be highly vulnerable to crises and controversy. Alongside global economic crises, challenges include political conflicts surrounding the distribution of private property as well as the dynamics of the knowledge-based economy and bio-economy, accompanied by alternative approaches to the public domain, the sharing economy and freedom of access.We believe that this transition constitutes a fundamental transformation in the institution(s) of property that is taking place on two levels. Structural change of property denotes a range of interdependent processes transforming the subjects, objects and systems of property, for example, new players and products on the financial markets, the management of non-rival or previously non-exclusive objects such as knowledge or wind, and new combinations of public and private ownership. Because property is a constitutive institution of modern societies, we also assume a structural change through property, as the reorganisation of that institution initiates a trans-formation of the overarching institutional order, social structure, the relationship between world, society and self, and everyday practices – without determining any of them fully. Material aspects of this structural change are currently being discussed in terms of the reorganisation of the welfare state, ‘post-democracy’ and ‘post-capitalism’. We hope to develop a new research perspective on the changes in question by pursuing three general assumptions. Firstly, the assumption that the ‘disembedding’ of private property in the sense of Polanyi prompts attempts at reembedding the same. Secondly, that the technological change towards a knowledge-based information economy promotes innovations both in capitalism and in its critique. Thirdly, that the specif-ic nature and materiality of new objects of ownership – from human ova to genetic codes – needs to be socially processed.The CRC aims to expand the classic property debates of philosophy, law and the economic sciences by ex-ploring the topic from the perspective of the social sciences and, in particular, of sociology. Through collaboration between these disciplines, supplemented by expertise from historians, political scientists, scholars of religion and of Chinese and South Asian Studies, we will endeavour to (re-)establish a social theory of property and explore the assumed transformation both on a conceptual and on an empirical level. To this end, we will a) revisit historical and conceptual foundations of Western systems of ownership, b) empirically investigate current conflicts about private property in the global North, Asia and Latin America, and c) analyse alternatives to (private) ownership that are currently being debated.

• DFG Programme: CRC/Transregios

Current projects

• A01 - Divine property: Solutions from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Project Heads Rüpke, Jörg ;  Vinzent, Markus )
• A02 - Property in one’s own body and in the bodies of others in the United States between the eighteenth and twentieth century (Project Heads Krämer, Felix ;  Martschukat, Jürgen )
• A03 - Property and habit: On the political anthropology of ownership in Western modernity (Project Heads Kleeberg, Bernhard ;  Mulsow, Martin )
• A04 - Order and property: Stabilisation strategies in twentieth-century Germany (Project Head Frei, Norbert )
• A05 - Testaments and bequests as tools for immortalising people and property (Project Heads Fischer, Christian ;  Harke, Jan Dirk )
• A06 - The normative foundations of property: Liberty, common and sustainable ownership (Project Heads Esser, Andrea Marlen ;  Wesche, Tilo )
• A07 - Habitat as a security: Pledged property and financialisation (Project Head Tellmann, Ute )
• B01 - Urban property regimes and citizenship in transition: Changing ownership patterns and systems of relatedness in India (Project Heads Fuchs, Martin Konrad ;  Renzi, Beatrice )
• B02 - Ownership of companies: The emergence and transformation of social corporate constitutions (Project Head Seifert, Achim )
• B03 - Public interest versus private property rights: Ownership structures of public-interest organisations (Project Head Geppert, Mike )
• B04 - Economic property and political (in-)equality: An analysis based on an elite theory approach (Project Heads Reiser, Marion ;  Vogel, Lars )
• B05 - Ownership, inequality and class formation in socio-ecological transformation conflicts (Project Head Dörre, Klaus )
• B06 - Property inequality in the private sphere: On the institutional and cultural (re-)structuring of ownership arrangements of couples (Project Heads Leuze, Kathrin ;  Scholz, Sylka )
• B07 - Property concepts and conflicts in the process of privatisation: Communal self-government and communal property in Eastern Europe since 1990 (Project Head von Puttkamer, Joachim )
• C01 - Hybrid ownership structures in state capitalism: Ownership-based society, socio-economic differentiation and Governmentality analysed through the example of Shenzhen, China (Project Head Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten )
• C02 - Property in the human body in the context of transnational economies of reproduction (Project Heads Graefe, Stefanie ;  Lettow, Susanne )
• C03 - Wind harvest and heat theft as indicators of new ownership structures (Project Head Groß, Matthias )
• C04 - Debating the public sphere and the future of the commons: Property relations in the context of welfare state transformation (Project Head van Dyk, Silke )
• C05 - Intellectual property: Social embedding and functional equivalents (Project Heads Reitz, Tilman ;  Sevignani, Sebastian )
• C06 - Making things available: Ownership as an incarnation of our relationship with the world (Project Heads Oberthür, Jörg ;  Rosa, Hartmut )
• Z01 - Concepts, Categories and Theories: Core project for conceptual integration, societal comparison and the securing of research results (Project Heads van Dyk, Silke ;  Reitz, Tilman ;  Rosa, Hartmut )
• Z02 - Central Task (Project Head Rosa, Hartmut )

• Applicant Institution: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
• Co-Applicant Institution: Universität Erfurt
• Participating University: Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg; Freie Universität Berlin; Technische Universität Darmstadt
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Hartmut Rosa